Buy Akaneiro: Demon Hunters w/ Starter Pack

November 6, 2014

Dear Hunters,
Apologies for not posting this along with the update itself. The developer responsible for the update (and for maintaining Akaneiro in general) has left Spicy Horse and forgot to pass this along when he departed. We finally tracked him down and tickled this list out of him...

Here are things that were fixed with the last update:

• Steam Account can now save progress and show the mission complete screen when the player returns to village (This was the most critical issue).
• The (small, medium and large) Red and Blue bottles drop item was showing only text and the mesh was hidden. Now it show the bottle mesh as well as the text.
• The drop Item text hold for a bit longer before disappearing.
• Some levels (in the last few areas) used to have a terrain Only (without any houses, meshes,...etc), now the bundles have been fixed and the player should see an entire level.
• Show the collected materials in the mission complete screen (was not showing on steam version).
• The MiniMap was strange (around area 4, 5 if I still remember well) and the player was walking on a black map, I rebuilt the bundles with the map enabled in those levels.
• Some of the armor/pants meshes show long spikes out the Character model (I'm not sure if this one have been released in the previous version or in this version)

Going forward, there is a HOLD on further development of the title. This will be the case until early 2015, when we will have developers coming free from another ongoing project in the studio. At that time we will assign them to work on Akaneiro and will continue efforts towards implementing multi-player, tablet support, and other improvements.

In the meantime, we have emailed Valve to ask for removal from the Early Access area of Steam, and placement within the normal Steam Store.

Please note that ours is a very small development studio with not many people to monitor discussions or reports of issues here on Steam. If you have an issue to report or feedback to provide, please do so via our official Customer Support channel here: http://support.spicyhorse.com

Reviews

“There's life in the movements of the characters on the screen and real appeal in the combat even though it's from the dungeon-grinder school that I'm normally very fatigued by.”
– Massively by Joystiq

“Akaneiro: Demon Hunters is a free to play action online RPG from Shanghai-based Spicy Horse. The game takes on the mix of Little Red Riding Hood – a European fairy tale- and The Lost Wolves of Japan -a book about Japanese history, literature and folklore.”
8.9/10 – MMOHUT

“Akaneiro provides players with a free to play ARPG of depth, blended seamlessly with the speed and intensity of a pure action title.”
3/5 – Bloody Disgusting

Starter Pack

Akaneiro is available for FREE on other platforms (like SpicyWorld and Kongregate), but not on Steam. Why?

On Steam we offer the game for sale with a Starter Pack that includes items and currency worth much more than the purchase price. If you don't wish to spend money to try Akaneiro, head over to a platform where it's offered for free. You can then decide for yourself if paying for it here on Steam in order to access the Starter Pack is worthwhile.

Planned Key Features:

Materials: June will see the introduction of material drops from enemies and significant drops from the Area bosses, with the chance and quality increasing with the difficulty of the Mission.

Crafting: With Materials dropping that means the Crafting vendor will open his doors, allowing players to upgrade the Element, Enchant and Gem attributes on the items.

More Areas: The Melon Fields (Area 7) will be releasing in the coming month with following planned content updates to include Temple Depths (Area 8), Survival Pits (horde style waves), as well as the Raid missions especially created for multiplayer.

Multiplayer: We have begun working on the multiplayer aspect of the game with internal testing expected in July.

Social: In-game Chat and Leaderboards to compare with the other Hunters out there.

Abilities and Masteries: More Abilities and Masteries to train based off of your base Discipline stats. Choosing your Discipline stats on level up will define your character in more meaningful ways.

Helpers: Easy access and use food and drink plus updates to Spirit Helpers through adding a leveling system to increase their effects on the player once summoned.

New Mission Types and Enemies: Expanding existing areas with new mission types over the next coming months to create a more broad experience for the player.

Achievements: Track your progress and show off your achievements with pride

Tl;dr: It's a decent hack 'n' slash game with good artwork, can get repetitive, made primarily for mobile devices, DON'T BUY IT ON STEAM SINCE IT'S FREE ON DESURA. Read below for more info.

I bought this game months ago (during a sale, phew!), and at first I remember I loved it. I loved the artwork, I loved the hack 'n' slash. I simply found this through browsing Steam, not their Kickstarter. I used to love just hacking and slashing, one downside was that to get better loots you have to do the same missions a few times with higher difficulty, just like other games, but this one doesn't make the higher difficulty more fun, it's rather boring to do it again and again in fact. (Which it still is now.)

As of writing this on November 11, 2014, yes, this game is free on Desura. Yes, there is micro-transaction, which is because this game was supposed to come out on iOS and Android as well. However, reading the comment section of their Kickstarter, there isn't any news on the phone versions yet. The weird controls are a result of this game being primarily a mobile game. You only use mouse left and right clicks which can be extremely irritating if you normally use WASD to move around.

The developing team is literally 1 person alone, and he had 2.7k people back the game with a total amount of 200k USD. Despite that, I didn't have high hopes after downloading it again today. In August, 2014, in which he replied comments on Akaneiro's Kickstarter, the developer explained the slow progress was due to him being alone in the whole development, HOWEVER, after the Kickstarter success in February 2013, he had since 1 failed and 1 successful Kickstarter campaign, both on different projects, with the latest successful one in August, 2013. So is he slacking off on developing this game?

I was fine with just going along and playing the game like I used to. However, I couldn't even load the one mission I wanted to play... I'm sorry but for now, I cannot recommend this game, especially since it's made for mobile WITHOUT controls for PC players, its horrible development, AND IT'S NOT FREE ON STEAM.

I played this game as much as I could but I couldn't honestly recommend it right now. There have been improvements and changes that I witnessed along the way but at the state that it is today, it isn't something that I would spend any more time for.

It was interesting at first due to the style of the art and theme but it then quickly became clear that was all that was keeping it afloat, for me.

I signed on to the Early Access of Akaneiro quite some time ago (not fully understanding what early access meant) but it showed alot of promise. The game itself was pretty enjoyable and things were working well, in addition it was a sort of different take on the game style (in terms of the character options and enemies). I though the game was sure to be out within a short time. Since then if anything the games seems to have fallen into disarray, things that did work no longer do and strange archaic systems have been added. I would avoid this especially since it is ftp elsewhere and wait until the game is finished

great rpg with hours of fun i wish i bought it years ago when it first became available on steam. i started to play the f2p version thats available on the web and instantly got hooked and hurried out to buy it on steam and get the beginners pack. the art style and game play are very uniuqe and the combat is very fun. the music is fantastic. i cannot wait for them to add mp *fingers crossed* hopefully sometime next year. this game is not p2w as some reviews might lead you to believe. the one feature i would love is for the ability to pick make your own custom class where you get to pick what masterys and abilities that chacter has that would be epic. i love to support smaller companys because they tend to try something new rather then make a game that plays like every other hack and slash game out there.

I tried it for free on Spicyhorse because of the negative feedback here. But its an amazing game and really love it. The art is great. The loot is abundant and items are different in appearance too not only stats. Combat is nice and does not get boring like many expensive games.The only problem is that I cannot load Mission 4 as it gets stuck at 2%.I have contacted support about it. Will update here when possible.

Update:It has been fixed. Played today and arrived at Mission 9 without any problems. Worked perfectly and never gets boring.Thank you for the quick fix.

The game itself looks pretty good, play fairly well. It reminds me a tiny bit of Okami with the art style. I very much dislike microtransactions. Charge me an extra $10 and be done with it, I can't recommend any game that has this built in. Sorry! I hope this will be dropped at release ... otherwise a big thumbs down from me.

Akaneiro is a potentially cool Diablo clone ruined by a greedy free-to-play pay scheme. Yes, it's f2p- except on Steam, where you spend $10 on in-game currency to play it. $10 should buy you the whole game, and even then it's so simplistic it would be hard to recommend. And it still isn't feature complete, despite a $200,000 Kickstarter and charging microtransactions on an unfinished game. Totally unbalanced, too.

I'm not even sure what the state of the game is, either. It's still listed as "early access" but I don't even know that it's being worked on any more. From what I can tell Spicy Horse has moved on to other projects on Kickstarter, leaving Akaneiro a half-finished mess. Having loved their work on Alice: Madness Returns, I'm disappointed by this game and their questionable business ethics.

I loved this game to bits in the beginning! Was looking forward to the promised co-op option. Sadly didn't happen. Was cool to have the option to summon a random character to help you out a bit, at least. I was shocked this game brought little to no profit to the developers. After the big changes that were made to the game, like changing the control keys (they used to be very well thought out, now they're confusing to use), I don't mind if a game is difficult, but the character is suddenly extremely weak physicaly and I have to heal every few seconds and constantly runaway from even one monster to avoid getting killed.. aaand ofc microtransactions.. I don't mind it as long as it's actually worth it, but here, it's not. Looked through everything and even though I was open to buy some of the karma crystals and/or shards, there's actually nothing really worth spending money on. Shame.. It used to be such an awesome and fun game in the beginning. *sad face* :(

Wow, usually I'm smarter than this. This is paying for a F2P game. With microtransactions. If you buy this, you're just an idiot like me. Don't be an idiot.

As a free to play game, it's pretty bad. F2P usually means MMO. In this case it means barely functional. The UI is terrible and hard to figure out. The camera isn't controlled, so melee tank classes are highly favorable. Levelling up is a mystery (does it do anything?). Coming from having played many ARPGs, this one is definitely different. And not really in a good way.

It's not all bad, but the graphics get a bit redundant and many critical items require a type of currency that is almost impossible to acquire; at least, impossible to acquire without shelling out actual cash. It reminded me very much of Diablo II. Generally I expect more from this kind of a franchise.

As 1 of the insignificant kickstarter of this project, i was hoping they would implement Co-op to accommodate online play with my friends... Now that news vendors are reporting the Company is facing major financial problems... I'm not sure anymore.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME ON STEAM!!!if you want to try this download for free at their site.currently most features are broken or missing...high end PCS are suffering a game breaking bug of audio/video lag.

I first wrote a review of this game on 09/01/2014 13:48 GMT, now I feel I have to change it slightly.

Second review based on playing the early access version 06/05/2014 18:44 GMT

Still in Early Access, hardly anything has changed, bug fixes etc but no game changing mechanics no improvements on current mechanics and no massive new content. I regret buying this product, and I've seen them adveritising and kickstarting other games. I don't think they care for this game anymore, now that I've heard they lost like $2m of what they put into the game when the kickstarter campaign was only asking for $200,000. I sense a little corruption here and I'd stay SO FAR away from this game before you think about buying it. Try it when it has come out of early access, when it does become an actual free to play game. Or alternatively, I think there is a legit browser-based version of this (same content) that you can play FOR FREE.

- - - -Parts of my original review, some edited.

I also disapprove making this game free to play and having it ridden with in-game stores, in-game currencies, bypassing gameplay and easy leveling/gear acquiring. I will be really disappointed if they stick to this because in my opinion it's very corrupt, and I'd rather pay full price than to have store updates, store discounts, and other cash-related ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ shoved in my face. This game has a lot of potential if they would just leave this out of the game. It reminds me a little of The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot, and the in-game currency system pretty much ruined the 'fun' and 'drive' for me.

The only issue I've had with the game is that, once you get the starter pack, you need to claim your items from the in-game mail system in the village ON YOUR FIRST EVER CHARACTER and put your items in your stash if you ever decide to delete the FIRST CHARACTER. Making a character, then deciding you want to delete it BEFORE acquiring the exclusive items, will delete them. I know this from experience, and I'm now awaiting a reply from Spicy Horse support regarding this awful situation. I'm sure it will be resolved, however I don't think I could recommend this game with out warning others first.

*****NEW EDIT************* It never got resolved, and my hope was diminished. I actually messaged them and a few weeks later after the incident - they finally got back to me and said that they couldn't give me the shards, they could only give me the items, like the food, Steam necklace, etc, BECAUSE since I bought the game and had the problem and WAITED for a reply from their support, their Early Access starter pack changed it's meaning - but they still advertised it on their store page. I was extremely pissed off at this. They couldn't give me the red or blue shards (these are used to purchase things, and blue shards are extremely hard to come by, unless you pay for them for in-game currency) so, I basically bought a FREE TO PLAY game, because I don't use EXP boosting food, or any ♥♥♥♥ like that. I bought a free to play game!!! For £6.99! Outrageous.- - - -

Hugely disappointed in Spicy Horse, I loved the hour or so I had on Alice Madness Returns (double check your origin version of the game, there are bugs, I hit a massive glitch and I can't get any further now with out rebuying the game on Steam cos I'm guessing you keep that up to date) and I had high hopes for this game. I even made a video about it and expressed why the micro transactions and the whole free to play state of mind will crush any chances of this game being good. I was right. I can't recommend.

Hugely disappointed. Pissed off I paid money for it, and I refuse to stick up for it just because I did. Spicy Horse get your act together please!!!!